It’s the third Saturday of the month. Jack Kilby arrives early to the McCalla School, where he works during the week as a gallery preparator in the University Collections. With him, he brings a crate or two full of vinyl records for people who may not have any, so they can still contribute and participate. The smell of coffee fills the room, a perk of attending the event, and he waits until 1 p.m. for his guests of “Record Show & Tell” to arrive.
When they arrive, each bringing their chosen records of the week, they fall into an organic, informal discussion about the songs they selected for that month’s meeting. The group does not follow a particular theme, rather participants are simply encouraged to bring a selection of songs that they care about. While the event is open to all, and is advertised as such, the core group is made up of about 10 Bloomington locals.
Kilby has organized “Record Show & Tell” for a year now. The event was formerly known as “Fossilized Frequencies” back when Kilby worked at the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Now format varies based on the attendees, but Kilby said they have settled into a comfortable and informal routine at their current meetings.
“Everybody plays about three songs, sometimes three sides, depending on how short their media is. And we sort of have a group conversation about (it),” Kilby said. “Sometimes it's like why they picked it or what genre it was, or what led them in the record collecting journey to come to that point, sometimes we talk about the format, the cover, the store where they got it, how they (or) where they dig for records, just anything to do with the records.”
Kilby started the show and tell while he was working as an exhibit assistant at the IUMAA Museum, but his love of records was born long before that. Before coming to IU, Kilby worked as an IU affiliate with the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative where he helped digitize IU’s record collection.
“I'm glad they embraced it over here when I moved across the street, they seem to help me promote this,” Kilby said. “And it brings people into this space.”
In addition to his professional interest in records, Kilby’s appreciation can be seen in his personal life through a side-job and hobby: record cutting. Since 2000, Kilby has run a record cutting studio. He used to have a shopfront in Artisan Alley, he has worked out of his house more recently.
“A lot of record houses are bogged up printing ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, because that sells and there's like 20,000 units that they're printing up;, a little band isn't going to get in in the schedule, so they'll settle for 50 of these handmade records that I'll make,” Kilby said. “I sort of do some reproduction type records where I cut on, I call them ‘experimental materials’ such as laser disks and X-rays.”
Kilby currently has a few contracts with out-of state-bands, including one that requests pressings of podcasts for a jukebox. Kilby said he appreciates the creativity offered to him through his work with local bands.
“I work with a lot of these experimental, maybe you call them ‘noise bands’ or independent labels, and so they want interesting packaging materials,” Kilby said. “It becomes this object more than an audio file. My background's industrial design, so I'm coming out of it from like a product design angle rather than an audio engineer angle. It's like I'm trying to get into that…consumer psychology, you know, to kind of make desire for this object.”
Despite the recent resurgence in records from Gen Z, the show and tell rarely gets many student visitors. Kilby said he didn’t know why.
“I promote it at the record stores. I promote on the flyer pillars in the town,” Kilby said. “I'm also a DJ and when we have events, I flyer, I let people know there. I don't know…I'm from the old school, so we're more like flyer in hand promotion, and we do have an Instagram page and I do Facebook events.”
To rectify this, Kilby reached out to multiple subgroups of IU, like the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and the Jacobs School of Music, with the latter posting the event on its calendar. Kilby hopes this promotion will increase the monthly show and tell’s visibility.
“We want to grow,” Kilby said. “We definitely would like more students to come and to be interested…you don't even need a record to come. We usually bring a couple of crates and people can just dig through and say, ‘Oh, this looks interesting. Let's play this.’”
Through the event, Kilby said he has learned more than he could have imagined about people’s niche areas of interest in music.
“I don't know everything about records and especially genres. There's so many genres so they might even be turned on to something very similar in the direction that they like that's not just an algorithm,” Kilby said. “It's very informal and very open. We might be record nerds, but we're not record snobs.”
Record Show & Tell will meet next at 1 p.m. on February 15 in the McCalla building.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to include the correct title for the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
